Ship design strategies
Ship design strategies can be documented here. Optimal Ship Size Does size really matter? The quick and dirty answer is that it depends. There are two schools of thought on shipbuilding. The first, is to go small, but build in high quantity. The second is to build fewer, larger ships. The differences depend on the strategy you most prefer. Smaller ships get fewer hit points, and can generally fit smaller numbers of weapons, armors and specialized modules. However, the cost of producing these smaller ships can mean that a player can produce them much faster than a frigate. Another advantage of smaller ships is that you can put more of them into any one fleet. Because Gal Civ adds all of a given fleet's ship's attack values together, this can mean that a bunch of small ships can take down a slightly smaller fleet of large ships. Let us think of it this way. 4 fighters with an attack value of 4 beam and 6 hit points are in a group against 2 medium sized ships with 6 beam attack and 20 hit points. When the battle commences, the four little ships take out one of the big ships fairly quickly (4 attack x 4 ships). Granted, the algorithm is not that simple, but you get the idea. The big ship returns fire, and maybe manages to kill one of the little ships. Still, with three little ships remaining, the attack value is still twice what the remaining big ship can manage. Thus, David brings down Goliath. Add in to this the fact that you can continually produce smaller ships at a faster rate than an equally situated opponent can produce bigger ships, and you can see how small ships can win the day. This does not mean, however, that smaller is better. Bigger ships provide flexibility, and by boosting the higher hit points, can suck up a lot of damage, making them more likely to survive battles and accumulate experience, which greatly affects ship performance. Further, a combination of big and little ships can mean that the big ship survives, gains experience, and also benefits from having the extra "oomph" that smaller ships added into a fleet can provide. Further, there is just something cool about seeing a dreadnought fly up next to an enemy planet and proceed to decimate that planet's defenses. Does this mean that a mass amount of medium and small sized ships would be the most cost efficient for most games? No, it is risky to put very expensive weapons or armors on the small ship because they die easily. The bigger ships are also more logistically efficient. 4 small fighters take twelve logistics points, while 2 medium ships take 8 points. This means 4 small fighters are more likely to find they fighting against 3 medium ships instead of two!--Dabei 01:08, 13 March 2006 (UTC) Best Weapon Technology Beam weapons, mass drivers, missiles... all of the above? Generally you should put on the weapons that has best damage/size ratio. However, some weapons like nano ripper are significantly more expensive. There is a rock/paper/scissors arrangement of the weapon types. Though many players prefer high offense to overpower defense, it pays to select weapons that attack the opponent's weak points. If your target empire's navy is dominated by ships with low mass driver defense, use at least some mass drivers to attack them. A second consideration is specialization. Trying to raise all three weapon areas might lead to mastery of none. Consider having one weapon technology be ahead of the others, so that overall firepower is enhanced. This is especially true early on, when the second tier weapons are twice as strong as first tier weapons. I tend to disagree with above poster : I found it very effective to have all weapon techs available at about the same level, which you can easily achieve by grabbing all necessary techs from other civs. Thus equipped you can always react on AI ships, no matter their defense. With a mastery of one weapon tree you more or less only achieve to be able to pack more of them into one ship, something you can simulate with miniaturization research. Mastery in one and beginner in the two others will probably mean your demise when the AI equips their ships with the corresponding defense, which it WILL do on bright or higher intelligence level. Defense Technology Shields, armor, point defense... or just pile on more weapons? The answer here is that once again, it depends. The biggest consideration here are your opponent's capabilities. Notice that by the formula described in the defense section, the total defense against any given attack is calculated as optimal def + sqrt(subopt defense1) + sqrt(subopt defense2), where the optimal defense is shields vs beams, armor vs mass drivers and point defense vs. missiles. As a result, installing a module with defense 1, regardless of its type, will have the same benefit against every type of attack. Additionally, having def value of 1 against each missile, mass drivers and beams is equivalent to having a def of 3 against any attack. This method of "spreading" defense begins to degrade as more modules are installed, however. But we digress. The real question is - does defense make a difference? From my experience, this depends entirely on whether you are fighting a lot of smaller ships or a few bigger ships, and also on how advanced your enemy's weapon capabilities are. Here are some observations I've made so far: Defense is important in early game, but becomes less so in mid and late game. This is because as weapon tech and minituarization advances, it becomes easier and easier to kill ships in one shot (since HP of ships remains fairly low even for larger hulls). ''FALSE: Maybe you can dispatch tiny vessels with one shot, but: a.) Experienced crews have gained more HP b.) Large ships have HP amounts of 50+ The highest shot I received in a late game session was 13 dmg. One large ship of my fleet can dispatch singlehandedly 7 small ships of the Iconians, which are as technologically developed as I am. Why ? Because I fitted the ship with two Barriers and the smaller ships cant scratch it with their Beam weapons. Sorry, but I fail to see how 50+ is low Hitpoints for a ship, and thats not even a Huge ship. Defense allows three large ships to destroy a fleet of 7 tiny ships with realtively low damage outputs. Defense is not nearly as important against large, heavily armed ships unless you can raise the appropriate defense value really high. In general speed is preferrable to defense once your ship's total attack value is 18+. Why 18? because that is the default number of hp for a medium ship, and because two ships with an attack of 18 or more would be expected to kill an unshielded medium ship with no retaliation. Furthermore, given an offensive and a defensive tech of the same level, the shield will take up slightly more space than the weapon module while providing equal or lesser defense (usually lesser as tech advances). As a hypothetical example, let's simulate a battles between two fleets of 3 medium ships each. Fleet 1 will have ships with an att of 8 and a def of 0. Fleet 2 will have ships with att 5 and def 3 each, and for the sake of argument we will assume that the 3 def is of the correct type. We will assume that each round, the average damage is inflicted, and the shield also perform on "average" Assuming fleet 1 gets first strike: Round 1: Fleet 1 inflicts 13.5 avg damage, 4.5 of which is negated by shields, for a total of 9 dmg. Fleet 2 retaliates for 9 dmg, none of which is negated, so thus far we are even. Round 2: Fleet 1 once again inflicts 9 dmg, which destroys one of the ships in fleet 2. Fleet 2 retaliates for 6 dmg, so fleet 1 still has 3 ships in it. Round 3. Fleet 1 yet again inflicts 9 dmg. Fleet 2 inflicts 6 more, which destroys a ship. Now fleet 1 has 2 pristine ships, fleet 2 has 2 ships, one of which sustained 9 dmg. Round 4. Both fleets do 6 dmg to each other. Round 5. Fleet 1 does 6 more dmg, fleet 2 loses one more ship. Fleet 2 retaliates for 3 dmg. ... Round 9. Fleet 1 inflicts 6 more damage, destroying the last ship in fleet 2. Fleet 1 survives with one pristine ship and one ship that has sustained 15 dmg (and has 3 hp left). Moral of the story - first strike determined the winner in this case. In theory two identical ships that have att + def values being equal will inflict the same average damage. However, a ship with a high attack value could get "lucky" and destroy the defended ship outright, whereas the ship with high def could not do that. Defense does make a difference, however, when one large ship goes up against 4 or 5 small ships. For instance, let's consider a fleet of 4 tiny ships, each with an attack of 8, going against a huge ship with an attack of 16 and a defense of 8. On paper, the fleet of 4 tiny ships will actually have an advantage over the huge ship - it will be listed as att 32 def 0 fleet going against an att 16 def 8 fleet. However, that 32 attack does not come in one large shot, it comes in several small shots. As a result, each tiny ship will on average inflict 4.5 - 4 = 0.5 damage to the huge ship, while the huge ship will on avergae do 8.5 - 0 = 8.5 dmg per shot. As you can see, this fight will almost certainly be a no-contest win for the huge ship despite the apparent attack superiority of 4 tinys. To conclude, defense is useful if you expect to be hit by a lot of low-damage shots, and not nearly as useful against large concentrated attacks. In general, it is also more useful to have first strike rather than higher defense. Armor Points - Perfect Squares - Even Distribution - by fsk+ It appears to be optimal to have the armor on your ships be a perfect square. Because "non-optimal armors only use square-root", building 2 or 3 points of armor is silly. Having 1 or 4 points is better, because the 4 points is effectively 2 when used non-optimally. In the early game, I found that adding a single point of armor to my small ships is a big benefit. Also, it pays to have 1 point of each. That gives you 3 effective points of defense. So, it pays to spread your armor tech spending evenly. It pays to focus your weapons tech spending; I like lasers because they're the most damage/space. Military Starbases and Ship Design It's worth taking a look at the effects of a military Starbase on your ship designs, as these beauties can really swing the space battles in your favour. If you have a military Starbase with a defense-assist module, this adds +x defense to any of your ships within its radius. However, this only applies if the ship already has at least +1 defense (in any category). This makes it extremely worthwhile to add at least 1 defense to all ships that you'll be using within range of such a starbase. The attack-assist works in a similar manner, in that you must have at least +1 attack (in any category) for the bonus to apply. Because this is a flat bonus and not a percentile one, the effect on small ships is much more significant than on larger ones. As fsk+ notes below, adding +1 armour is very effective in the early game - combining it with a starbase defense assist module will make even a small or medium ship a really tough nut to crack. I tend to focus my starbases on +defense, add just +1 defense to my ships, and then use the rest of the ship space for adding weapons, engines and utility modules. Category: Strategy Category: Ship design